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“The thing you love most when you are thirteen is the thing you love forever,” Adi says. He has his leg crossed over his lap, hand on his knee in a scholarly position.
“You’re bound to it,” I add, leaning forward. “You can’t put it down.” I am drunk and twenty years old and my voice aches—I have been shouting for most of the night, but the music isn’t really that loud. I tilt my body toward the group to understand them, a hand around my ear in what feels like a theatrical gesture. The boy Adi and I are chatting with is soft-spoken mumbling-drunk, with dark eyes that scrunch up beautifully when he smiles. “Say again?” I repeat over and over. He stands up to grab a beer off the table between us, jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and Adi and I look at each other with our eyebrows raised. I giggle and he glares back—we are always passing sly glances back and forth like handwritten notes between school desks.
The boy’s name is Alan and he is disarmingly handsome, the kind of man I would have avoided in high school out of shame and fear. I am fascinated by beautiful men, their ease of movement, the carelessness of their limbs. I watch them and think of Margaret Atwood: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss…My love for them is visual: that is the part I would like to possess.” A desire that stems from a sense of possession; I would like to inhabit them, to take up space and know that everyone around me feels grateful. To be a beautiful white man and never know fear—how simple and glorious.
There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death. In another world, I fall in love with this boy who shares my taste in music and laughs generously at my less-than-clever drunken commentary. In another world, things are easier. In this world, we dance and sing Talking Heads to each other across the kitchen as we spin in circles: I guess that this must be the place. In another world, I do not go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, watching my reflection careen across the glass. In another world, I do not make myself sick with want and worry at every turn.
Alan sits back down beside Adi and we talk about California. Whenever I meet someone who’s left California for New York, they can never shut up about being from California and how much they miss it, as if they hadn’t chosen to leave. Alan tells us that in California he met Paul McCartney once, and I clutch my hand to my collarbone in a mockery of a swoon because that is what I loved when I was thirteen, what I am bound to forever, the thing I cannot put down. There will always be a part of me that starts at the mention of The Beatles, that blip of recognition when you come across your own name in an unexpected place.
“I know this sounds corny,” he says, “but I swear to God he just made the whole room brighter.”
The enthusiasm in Alan’s voice strikes me. He tells me he saw Arctic Monkeys seven times in one year because he was in love with Alex Turner and again I am envious of him, this time because I never allowed myself to notice any women as a teenager. I instead fixated on male celebrities and characters, as if I could convince myself that I loved them the way I was supposed to love them. I want to know, suddenly, if he went to those concerts because he knew he wanted to see the lead singer, or if he had convinced himself it was because he just really liked their music. But I do not ask. Instead I stare at the mole on his right hip, made visible by his low-slung trousers. The mole is largish, about the size of a dime, and raised slightly. I try to imagine myself putting my mouth on it, on this bit of flesh which has so captured my attention, and am immediately repulsed.
This is where it always stops, the insurmountable stutter of my fantasies. This is the part I find difficult to explain even to myself, the way I can simultaneously want and so clearly not want. I picture the thoughts in my mind as a strip of film: reversed, softened, made grand by my drunkenness, mimicking how things are always beautiful onscreen. I can desire this boy as if from afar rather than with the blistering intensity I feel when a girl sits too close to me on a stranger’s bed at another party as she speaks to someone else, the air soft with smoke, my insides folding in on themselves. The universe is reduced to the point at which our hips are touching and I cringe at the clichés this meaningless contact inspires in me.
I think about Paul McCartney, his boyish features still apparent in old age: wide, down-turned eyes and full cheeks and always that charming smile. My favorite Beatle fluctuated between him and George, whose quiet demeanor intrigued me; I have always been inclined toward the fantasy of quiet men. I would watch videos of early performances for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from George’s legs, how dreadfully slender they were in his dark slacks as he stood off to the side of the stage. Ringo was about as attractive to me as a post (though darling) and John looked far too much like my father, so my desire, or what I thought was desire, had to be cast onto Paul and George. This was how I amused myself throughout most of my early adolescence: poring over photographs and watching footage from decades earlier of a half-dead, long-fractured band. Maybe The Beatles were easy to love because the group had already run its course—I could discover new information but nothing new would actually happen, and there was a comfort in this impassable distance. I cannot say that if, in another world, I would have been reduced to tears like all the girls in A Hard Day’s Night, wordlessly mouthing George-George-George as the crowd around me fell into hysterics, or if the illusion would have been ruined by seeing them in the flesh.
I think about the sightless stare of a Roman bust in a museum, terrifying and opalescent, made lovelier by the fact that I cannot touch it. In another world, I step past the line on the floor of the gallery and run my fingertips over the marble despite the docent’s protests. In another world, I tell Alan the truth: I will never be happy with what I have or what I am.
Says Alan of Alex Turner: “I don’t think I even realized who he was, the first time—he walked right past me, in those fucking Chelsea boots, and I was just so turned on,” and I laugh because it’s always those fucking Chelsea boots. The Beatles wore them, too.
I tell Alan that I’ve been in the same room as David Byrne, white-haired and gracious, those darkly intense eyes gentle with crow’s feet and laugh lines, and Alan concedes that this is indeed “very, very cool.” In high school, I would have recorded such a statement from a hot boy in my journal. Now it just seems obvious. It was a screening of a documentary about competitive color guard that David Byrne had produced, with a Q&A afterwards. My friend was a huge fan of Talking Heads and I came along because I was a huge fan of her; I barely paid attention to the the Q’s that David A’ed because I was swept up in the thrill of watching someone I love watch something she loves. Her sardonic voice was made sweet as she described her enjoyment of the evening, tucking herself into a red raincoat ill-suited to the frigid March weather. Now whenever I listen to Talking Heads’ bizarre, frenetic music, I think of her with a twinge in my chest not unlike heartburn. People sometimes ask me about her, mention her to me in passing: didn’t you know—? weren’t you—? I smile, tight-lipped, and nod. In another world, I tell Alan that I buy the shampoo she used because I miss the smell of her dark hair as it wafted toward me, head on my shoulder.
“Stop, don’t talk about it,” I say to Adi when he mentions her. “If I talk about it, I’ll cry.” I’ve been saying this for the past few months, begging friends to help me maintain the illusion that I wasn’t deeply hurt by her decision to return to Texas. The less we say about it the better.
We talk about how it would be nice to leave New York, but none of us stay away for very long. We all have our reasons. Mine is a sense of obligation to my younger self, the anxious, dirty-haired creature who collected postcards from Manhattan and watched The Beatles with a thumb-sucking compulsion and dreamt of someday ending up in a different body in a different place. She needs me to remain in this city, for at least a little longer, regardless of the people who come and go and the women I watch and want and the men I may or may not speak to at parties.
Most people have left the party by the time Adi and I declare mutiny and claim the aux cord for ourselves. Alan stretches as he makes room for me on the couch. His grey sweatshirt again rides up across his belly and I think about Saint Sebastian: his long, muscled torso, the agony and eroticism of his death as it is depicted in art. How I should like to be an arrow and glance off the flesh of some beautiful thing before falling, unbroken, to the ground. I think about Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of Saint Sebastienne as a martyred pregnant woman, the same sketch repeated over and over in a monotonous procession of bodies, smudged and headless: the grotesquerie of gestation. How awful is the practice of becoming alive.
Weeks later in Boston, my friend Laura and I discuss the dreams we’ve been having since we were little girls, nightmares in which we are pregnant despite never having had sex and everyone tells us we should be grateful to be so immaculate. But Laura is Jewish and I was never baptized and neither of us believe in anything beyond the miracle of blood and tubing that is the body itself. The nightmares persist as a reminder of what that body may be capable of, both within and without ourselves.
Hours past midnight, Adi and I walk to my apartment from the party. “Do you wish you were straight?” I ask him. He shrugs. I say, “I do, sometimes. I think it would be easier. Don’t you think it would be easier?” I hope he knows I mean easier just in the simple act of existence: would it be easier to be alive? Would I hate myself for something else if not this?
Adi doesn’t answer, but his gaze is warm behind his glasses, his jaw set in the near-pout he wears when he considers something seriously. He is a dear friend, one of the first I made at college, and one of the first people I heard utter the word “lesbian” with a gravity that implied strength and meaning rather than disdain. I lean into his shoulder and we stand like that, quiet, until Adi’s Lyft arrives.
A month and some weeks later, I stand in the living room of another apartment, once again speaking loudly over the music to an acquaintance. The theme of the party is blue, as in Maggie Nelson’s seventh book, as in Derek Jarman’s final film, as in Nina Simone’s debut album Hey, blue, there is a song for you. My acquaintance’s eyelids are a bright teal, in lovely contrast to her copper hair that falls into her face as she leans in to hear me. I feel a touch at the back of my neck and I turn around and it is Alan once again, tucking the tag back into the collar of my shirt. This is an urge I have to resist when I glimpse a misplaced tag or loose thread on a passing stranger, the same compulsion that makes me check the locks on the front door nightly before bed, a desire for security through control. Alan has not shied away from this impulse to put things in their proper place. His face, cast in cobalt, grins back at me when I turn.
Already I can feel the sense of infatuation ebbing away as I greet him, repeat my name, raise my arms around him in a clumsy approximation of an embrace. Names are important, and it bothers me on a primal level when people forget them. Alan is still handsome with his watery-drunk smile and half-lidded eyes. The man asleep, like the man in quietude, was another adolescent fixation of mine: a feral animal tranquilized to be observed more safely.
The apartment is so small and so full of bodies that we can hardly do more than shuffle in time with the music. While waiting for the bathroom, I get into an argument with a man about Kate Bush, and how would he understand the anguish conveyed in her warbling falsetto, anyway? I don’t know what’s good for me I don’t know what’s good for me.
I spend the next two years moving farther away from my body. I try to date casually and discover that I am perhaps incurably afraid of intimacy. I become catatonic in the presence of my own desire, though I spend a summer trying to convince myself that it’s the heat and humidity rather than the rush of blood in my ears that makes me nauseous every time someone tries to touch me. I sit across from a man on the subway and stare at the soft curve of his jaw as he tilts his chin downward; his dark eyes rove across the pages of a book whose title I can’t quite make out. In another world, it is the 1950s in the United States of America and I am engaged to this beautiful man whom I will never love and this is better, somehow. It’s a mid-century sitcom marriage where we sleep in separate beds and only ever kiss on the cheek. I am miserable, but it’s better than being miserable in reality because in this dream I have what feels like a justifiable reason to be miserable. My life is unfulfilled, uninspired. I see East of Eden at the cinema and masturbate to the thought of James Dean the same way I did as a teenager, silently rocking back and forth in a chair, disgusted by the idea of actually touching myself. In this world I never figure out that I’m a lesbian because I could barely figure that out in 2016 with contemporary resources. It’s easier anyway, following an assigned path, filling a prescription month after month at the pharmacy—doctor’s orders. In another world, my sadness has sharp contours, clear edges that I can press into my skin. It is not amorphous and it does not expand to fit every space I inhabit.
I try to describe some of this world to Laura in a taxi, drunk and newly twenty-two on the hottest night of last summer. “Do you ever wish that’s how it was?” Laura tells me she doesn’t—she’s tired, and she turns away from me to look out the window as we arrive at my apartment. “It’s almost light out,” I say to change the subject, waving a hand in the direction of the sky.
I am glad that I didn’t tell her the extent of my dreams, the tragic details that lull me to sleep. It is so perversely appealing to me, this fantasy of a loveless, sexless, meaningless existence in which I am freed from any expectations of self-possession or choice. In another world, no one asks me what I want to do with my life because they do not assume that I will ever do anything. I know this way of thinking is self-indulgent and wildly privileged, and that Laura’s reaction to my modest proposal was appropriate: a snort that went from surprised to scornful, a firm “No.” And yet I greet sleep that morning with dreams of pin curls and bathroom tiles scrubbed clean and never being touched by my beautiful imaginary husband, asleep beside me in his bed across the room.
Adi and I watch A Hard Day’s Night and he touches my arm when he notices I’m crying and we can pretend, briefly, that we knew each other when we were thirteen. Laura tells me that she is a lesbian, too, and this more than anything makes me feel like I may someday be able to overcome my shame because Laura is someone who did know me when we were thirteen. Through my love for her I may be able to forgive myself the trespass of being who I am. She tells me she sometimes still dreams of having children, but since realizing she is a lesbian she is no longer so afraid of the possibility.
I see David Byrne again and this time he sings. I wonder what it’s like for him to play those songs from another time when his band all lived together in the same room, cutting each other’s hair, muddling through waves new and old only to end up estranged forty years later—no talking, just head. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dogged by other people’s hopes of a reunion from the day The Beatles broke up until that night at the Dakota, and I wonder if it bothered them to know that the best thing they ever did was be part of something beyond themselves. In another world, rooftops are only for concerts, never for leaping. In another world, I am not afraid of heights or the way my body moves through time and space, toward the ground or toward another body.
***
Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde
When I was a kid, our house flooded. Twice. During heavy summer rains, water from the creek in our front yard flooded the basement and then the first floor, ruining almost everything we owned. Soggy couches, mud-encrusted carpets, and moldy mattresses filled our manicured front lawn. It felt like weeks that my family spent our days breathing moldy air and sitting on the floor, surrounded by buzzing high-speed fans and gurgling dehumidifiers hammering at floor tiles till they cracked and came up. Everything was mold coated and had to be removed. A few years later, when I was in high school, I was home alone for what was almost a third flood. My parents were out of town when it rained hard for two solid days. On the third day, the creek began creeping slowly toward the house. I felt sick to my stomach as it rose above the front step and lapped at the front door. I was planning my escape through waist-high water when the rains miraculously stopped, and the creek receded.
So I know a few things about how we humans deal with an impending, slow-arriving disaster. When the water first begins to rise, we tell ourselves it’s not going to happen. We are firm in our disbelief. Thirty minutes later, as the water rises higher, we tell ourselves it will stop. When the water is a foot away from the front door, we think about leaving, but we wait. We deny. We bargain. We hope. Maybe we pray. Only as the water crosses the threshold and begins to consume our furniture do we decide that now is the time to leave. But the water is now so high that we must wade or even swim to safety.
Deciding to be honest with ourselves during hard times is like watching floodwaters rise. We don’t face ourselves when we should, but we wait, deny, bargain, hope. By the time we’ve run through these feeling states, the only remaining option is to act; if we don’t, we will be subsumed in our own psychic floods, forced to swim through the muddy water of our minds, desperate for safe shores. We will flail.
As I drove across the golden moonscape that is the Judean Desert, with its wide-lens views of the barren Judean Hills, resembling massive breaching whales, the water of my life was lapping at my door. Having waited too long for a calm and sensible self-rescue, I was scrambling desperately for high ground. Every time I blinked, I saw Paul’s dead body lying on the hallway carpet, then my own. Blink. Paul. Blink. Brad. I couldn’t touch the memory of our last conversation, when Paul told me, in so many words, that he planned to end his own life. I couldn’t face the seven years I’d just wasted in a miserable, drugged-out haze. That floodwater had filled the basement, and I was terrified to open the door and look down into that watery darkness. It was time to swim to safety. I needed hope. I couldn’t say exactly how traveling across Palestine, how following in Jesus’s footsteps, how baptizing myself was going to lead to my healing. I just knew that this was what I needed to do. Some deeper part of my psyche—my soul?—was guiding me. Perhaps it was steering the car. Was the road back to me out there somewhere in this moonscape?
At the same time, I did feel ready to get real with myself. I knew I had to make corrections in how I was moving through the world, but I didn’t know how. I was confused about my life, particularly my experience with my own family. As I drove, I fell into melancholy self-pity. I felt like an orphan. It’s painful not having the support of family; it’s worse when they really don’t like you. After I grew up, my outspokenness about my family’s issues made me their enemy. Slowly, I was pushed out and treated like a pariah. When I did return home for an occasional holiday visit, I faced a family that seemed to see me and my desire for openness and honesty as “the problem.” I had been in weekly therapy since I was twenty-five, and I’d read countless self-help books about how to heal my codependency and other effects of growing up with my dysfunctional family. But the one thing I didn’t learn—or I was in denial about—was just how reluctant dysfunctional families can be to look at themselves. And how in denial I was about my family. I get it now. Most people don’t desire radical honesty. But that more naive Brad, who came home at Thanksgiving or Christmas hoping for a different family experience, couldn’t fathom that they didn’t want to talk about feelings or relationships, let alone discuss a path to healing ourselves. And although my father had learned to drink less, he still drank, and, in my experience, he never did a thing to face his own emotional issues or to repair the damage he’d done to our family. At holiday dinners, I sat at the table, sipping my sparkling water and listening to everybody present blather on about trivial things I didn’t know or care about, feeling unseen, frustrated, and angry at the lack of emotional intimacy. By dessert, we had all removed our gloves. Insults flew freely, and my mother cried.
And yet I knew I couldn’t heal all by myself. I needed community—even advice, maybe fatherly advice. But there was nobody I trusted. My father and the rest of my family was off the table. They treated me like a fraud as if I’d never led the life of a successful magazine editor and adventure writer, though that’s how I’d made my living for fifteen years. They laughed and rolled their eyes when I said anything about my successful travel-writing career.
I now understand the dynamic better. Or I think I do. My family needed to see me as a Walter Mitty, the ordinary guy who fantasized constantly about a more adventurous life than the one he lived. When those Dos Equis beer commercials featuring the Most Interesting Man in the World appeared on television, they laughed and said that’s you, Brad. In my family’s narrative, like the Most Interesting Man in the World, I was a raging narcissist, a ridiculous liar, and my years of success as an editor, adventure travel writer, columnist, and author of a collection of my nature writings by a major publisher was a figment of my imagination.
This narrative, as hurtful as it was, later became an essential piece of information in my reaching an understanding about what had happened to me: to my life, my spirit, my sense of self. It also highlighted the denial, the dysfunction, the extreme masculine power struggle, and perhaps the toxic narcissism that formed our familial paradigm. Later still, after Donald Trump became president, I found more insight. Trump and his supporters referred to facts as “fake news,” which was exactly the way I felt my family had treated the facts of my life and, essentially, who I was as a person, as a man: in their eyes, I was a fake. Whatever was going on with my family, I appeared to have become fake news to them. My stories became fake. I was fake. Ironically, they cast me as the family scapegoat to avoid looking at themselves, their own patterns of behavior. s
And yet, looking back on this time, I can see that I was causing myself more suffering by not accepting the reality of this family tragedy. Perhaps they wished they had a different son–and I wished I had a different family. I couldn’t yet accept this about them–about me–and save myself from the toxicity by walking away.
By the time I arrived in Palestine, I was struggling to regain my own story. I had been willing to abandon myself, my own truth, and the memories of the things I had accomplished. I had believed others’ version of me more than I trusted my own. Now, in this holy place, I wondered, What was the true story about my life? I honestly didn’t know. Coming here to walk in Jesus’s footsteps was my way of seeking a new model, a different paradigm, a solid story to lean on. Jesus was a vital figure from my youth. When you take away the religious aspects of the story, he was the ideal man. He was accepting, generous, kind, and sought justice for all. He was someone that we imperfect humans, driven by impulses and fragilities beyond our control, could strive to emulate. Jesus was strong, compassionate, merciful, outspoken, and he wasn’t a pushover in the face of powerful men and social organizations. He spoke his mind, and he faced the ultimate consequences. Who wouldn’t want to be like Jesus?
With all of this in my mind and heart, I drove across the Judean Desert. Could this weird journey through history, sacred religious scriptures, and my own past show me anything useful about how to rebuild my life? I had to find out.
I saw the turnoff for the baptismal site at Qasr el Yahud on the western bank of the Jordan River, slowed down, exited the highway, and pulled into the parking area.
I was mesmerized—not by the meaning I believed I was about to experience but by the red sign posted on the barbed-wire fence to my right: “Danger Mines!” Beyond the sign and fence was what you’d expect a minefield to look like: acres upon acres of dirt built up into little gopher-like mounds. After the 1967 war, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the army placed four thousand explosive devices in the ground to prevent anyone from taking back the land.
Qasr el Yahud was also the site of significant Old Testament events; this bend in the river was the place where, according to Jewish tradition, the Israelites crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land for the first time. It’s also the place where tradition says the prophet Ezekiel ascended to heaven.
Wow, I thought as I stepped out of the car and onto the hot pavement. A minefield next to the site where Jesus experienced his spiritual rebirth and where the Jewish people first entered the Promised Land?
I walked toward the cluster of palm trees that lined the river. The pavement stuck to my flip-flops like chewing gum. The minefield disturbed me deeply, even if it was on the other side of a fence and I could easily steer clear. That wasn’t possible with another frightening thing, parked under a palm tree: a massive bus with a sign in the windshield indicating its passengers were members of a church in Dallas, Texas.
I couldn’t help but smile.
The church folks from Texas mobbed the visitor’s center, though I admit they were less scary in person than in theory. It was a quiet, sweet, multiracial group of men and women huddled on the wooden steps, all descending to the water. I smiled and waved to an older woman who looked so ecstatic—as if she’d just won the Texas Powerball. I kept moving to the far side of the steps to sit and take in the scene.
That’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river. A heavyset, blond man with a matching goatee, I figured he was the pastor, playing the part for the group. He wore a white robe that exposed his hairy chest. It wasn’t a camel-hair shirt like the original John the Baptist was said to have worn, but this modern John fit the part perfectly. His face beamed.
A middle-aged woman with a boyish haircut stood in the water next to modern John. His hand rested on the crown of her head, and he was reciting a prayer that I couldn’t make out. She was crying joyfully and appeared to be in a state of blissful spiritual overwhelm. Then he looked her in the eye and seemed to ask, Are you ready? She nodded. He placed one hand on her shoulder and the other against her lower back. He pushed her back gently until she disappeared under the water for a full second. After helping her resurface, he cupped his hands and poured three successive palmfuls of water over her head. By now, she was weeping loudly. He hugged her, and then, with one hand resting on his own heart, he gestured with the other hand that it was time for her to wade back to shore. She climbed out of the water and back onto the wood steps, at which time another church member—an elderly man with short gray hair, wearing horn-rimmed glasses—stepped gingerly off the riser into the water and waded out.
The baptisms continued, but I had seen enough. I moved to a dry patch of grass far enough away that I couldn’t hear the others. I reflected on the story of Jesus’s baptism, which I still knew quite well a good thirty years after I’d studied it so intently.
Sometime around his thirtieth birthday, Jesus left his home in Nazareth and traveled on foot roughly a hundred miles to Jerusalem. It was there he learned about John the Baptist, a renegade, wild man figure who had made a reputation for himself performing a new type of spiritual cleansing in the Jordan River, an adaption of the longstanding Jewish ritual of frequently purifying oneself by bathing in blessed water. Jesus walked east, toward the Jordan, to receive this purification. John doused him and blessed him. Then, according to the biblical narrative, the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended “like a dove,” landing on Jesus. It was then that Jesus fully embraced his identity as the Son of God.
Now, thousands of years later, I was sitting on a patch of grass at the location where Jesus received his first hit of divine inspiration and launched his world-changing spiritual crusade. I had felt a pressure in my body, a necessity, to see this place with my own eyes and to experience it in my own body. I hoped it would help me see something new about myself or remember something—I wasn’t sure which. Could I find divine inspiration here, too, like Jesus had? I was no savior, I knew that. Far from it. I lacked a job, let alone purpose. But I was still a seeker, and I came here seeking something. I’d been housebound for so many years, slowly trying to rid myself of all that ambition and ego that had driven me to be an adventure writer.
The word “ego” is confusing. In Eastern spirituality, it has a negative connotation: it is the selfish part of us that gets in the way of achieving enlightenment. But the ego has a far different meaning—and purpose—in the Western psychological tradition. Ego is how we relate to the world. We need a sufficiently strong ego to earn a living, negotiate relationships, live with meaning and purpose, and so on. Many people who show up in treatment for mental illnesses have an undeveloped or fractured ego. Our ego is the part of our minds that must face the bumps and curves of the real world. After my collapse, all that high-test ambition drained away, revealing the truth that ambition and grandiosity overcompensating for my toxic shame and unworthiness had functioned as my ego. What was left of me when you took away the career, the relationship, the family, the pills? I felt as murky as the muddy Jordan.
I wouldn’t have described it like this in 2012, but I now see that I needed to build a healthy ego, which had been squashed during my childhood years. I needed to rebuild myself, but there was no map because I was unsure of starting point—me. I knew I did not want to become just another asshole American man, overly focused on achievement, money, acquisition, competition, woefully disconnected from his feelings apart from anger. I had played that game, and I wasn’t interested in rebuilding my life, only to fall back into the same traps that led to my breakdown in the first place.
The only thing I knew—a small, quiet part of my gut knew—was that spirituality might play a significant part in what I needed to structure a life that mattered to me. Every spiritual path I was aware of asked the same thing of its followers: humility. I was ready for that. I didn’t have any reason not to be humble. I had very little going for me. Everything I’d done to try to feel better had failed: sex, travel, drugs, self-help books, relationships, psychiatrists, life coaches. How was it that I was forty-six years old and felt no better than I did during those sleepless nights of my youth when I remember reading the Bible after walking my drunk dad to bed?
Full of self-pity, I tossed a small stick into the river and watched it float southward toward the Dead Sea. I knew it would never arrive there. I’d read that the Jordan River was drying up; a few miles from here, this gently flowing stream slowed to a trickle and eventually became sandy riverbed. I felt like doing a disappearing act myself.
I had hoped I would feel differently here; I’d hoped to feel inspired, invigorated, ready to take on the next chapter of my life. Even if I didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, I’d hoped that if I sat by the Jordan, maybe I might feel the Holy Spirit entering me—or some kind of spirit. I’d hoped for so much, but writing this now, I understand that hope—is useless. On that day, I was still leaning too heavily on hope.
As the stick I’d tossed disappeared around the bend, I noticed that it was quiet and I was alone. The Texans had left the river and were back at the bus waiting to board. I felt a little prickle of heat move through me. A small sense of excitement about being alone in this popular sacred spot pushed through the lethargic, deadening weight of my hopeless thoughts.
I don’t think I consciously decided to do what I did next.
I looked around once more to make sure I was truly alone. I removed my sandals and shirt. I pulled my shorts up around my waist and removed my sunglasses, setting them on top of my sandals. Then I turned my gaze to the center of the river to the deep spot where the contemporary John the Baptist had just been standing, blessing his flock with gentle dunks in the water. I stepped off the wooden stairs and into the river. Ankle high. I took another step. Knee high. And another. Thigh high. And then waist high. Until I was standing in the middle of the Jordan River up to my chest. The water was tepid and murky, unlike the fresh, cool streams from Colorado near my home. But at this moment, that didn’t matter. It felt deeply cleansing, even life preserving. Unlike the floodwaters of my youth, I welcomed the murkiness, too, as the water rose against my torso. Instead of fleeing these waters, I wanted the stream to fill me up, replace my own blood.
I looked up toward Jerusalem. I was still alone, which felt like a small miracle in and of itself. I inhaled. I exhaled. And then again. I felt nervous. But why? What was the point of any of this? And then I took a breath so big I thought I might float into space. I bent my knees and let my feet off the river floor. My head dropped under water. I stayed there. I paused, my eyes squeezed tight against the muddy water, my breath slowly exiting my nose.
Do I have to come up? My mind drifted back to that May afternoon of my childhood on the White River in Arkansas where I almost drowned, and my father made no motion to save me. I felt the hard, rough log against my skinny-kid torso. I felt the broken branches dig into my skin. I felt the upriver current pushing me hard into the log. I felt the downriver current pulling at my spindly limbs. In that weird way in which so much can happen in an instant, I found myself wondering how big a container I’d need to hold all the pills I’d stuffed down my throat over the years with the hope that they would save me, make me different, make me whole. A pickup? A dump truck? A garbage truck? Then I imagined the drugs, which still were in my bloodstream at a disturbingly high level, being washed away downriver. I imagined my sins washed away. All of them.
I found my footing on the sand and stood up. As my head emerged from the water, I felt a wellspring of emotion rise from my belly through my chest, neck, and jaw, and then tears burst from my eyes. I wept loudly.
Jesus Christ, where the hell are you? Where’s the love? Where’s the kindness? Where’s the fucking grace?
As I stepped out of the river, a new vitality pulsated through my body, warm and full. It moved like energy but felt solid at the same time. Strong, too. This current streamed through my legs and then my torso. It felt like hot, liquid steel was being poured into the mold of my body. It felt like power but without the edge. It was directed at nobody. It simply was. I tried to make sense of it with words: it felt like survival. I was here. Still here. I was alive, in this body, in this river, in this moment, right now. I had made it through the darkest days when I was convinced that I might not make it through the night, too confused about who I was, why I felt so alone. At times, I had felt like I was truly dying from the inside.
But I didn’t die. And I was not going to. Not now. I was going to find my way back home. Not to Kansas. To me.
Back in my car, the hot vinyl seats seared the skin on my legs. My clothes felt swampy after the river dunk. I started up the car and drove slowly past the sign “Land Mines!” How enthusiastic, this sign, and how deeply sad. I rolled past the barbed wire and mounds of dirt and rejoined the highway.
I was confused about what I’d just done, and yet I felt hopeful that it had been more than a silly recreation or a passing moment of folly or fear. I desperately wanted it to mean something more, to mark what I craved to be true: No more chaos. No more shame. No more suffering. Admittedly, I was a little too hopeful. I was again placing my hopes on something external that might save me, contain me, heal me. But this time, that thing wasn’t a pill or a woman or a promotion or a hot story or an accolade. That, I knew, I believed, was a start and a deeply important one. The trance of my life—the shame, the avoidance, the escapism, the cocktail of medication—hadn’t been washed away. I was still in that trance. The difference was that I’d spotted the exit. Now the only question was, How do I open the door?
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An excerpt from Into the Soul of the World, forthcoming later this month.
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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
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Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
The thing about living with my ex’s mural of his own ex about two hundred feet from my apartment was that I loved it. She looked out sideways, lips parted as if she were about to speak. The first time I saw him, a year or two before we began dating, he was painting daisies in her hair. I found more images of her while I sat in his studio. He didn’t pay rent. A family had offered him the carriage house above their garage for free, and in return, he gifted them black-and-white paintings of birds. The studio was a small room, layered in indecipherable spray-painted phrases. He used the pointed ends of finished X-Acto blades to pin photos to the wall. There was no heat and no air conditioning, and I always suspected that, even if other families had offered other studios, he would have chosen this one anyway. Once, he asked what my type was, romantically, and the only unifying factor I could find between the people I had slept with was that a disproportionate number of them had jumped into frozen ponds for absolutely no reason at all.
Murals occupied a relatively small amount of his working time—they were completed in a few exhausting days—but they were what people knew. They were impossible not to know if you lived in Richmond, a small city that prided itself on being the artsy part of Virginia. When I moved there, I had wanted to be an artist too. I’d come for an illustration program, but I had also loved the city for its physical beauty, which he had, in part, created. His ornery black-and-white faces showed up in the background of maybe 10% of Richmond dating app profiles.
And still, I felt that asking him about his work drew too much attention to something vulgar. It made me pause on his Tinder profile, but it wasn’t what made me swipe. Of course, I knew who he was; I followed him on Instagram; I knew his painting of a twenty-foot topless woman on the side of my neighborhood diner; I knew that it was originally supposed to be a portrait of a girl who was tangentially connected to my group of friends.
***
The story went like this: after the photos were taken and the design approved and the muralist had set up to paint, the girl changed her mind. Her boyfriend had teased her because the design was recognizably her and exposed her nipples. At the last minute, the muralist had to find another model before his lift rental expired. My roommate and I talked about this often as we passed the diner, the breasts distorted up close. We asked each other whether we’d want our own nipples to bless the town, if we’d see it as an honor or a liability.
Art was the muralist’s full time job. He’d received a grant that paid his expenses for six months after college, and in this time, built enough of a following to live off his work. He often bartered: a print for a new fish tank, a quick brewery wall for a few hundred dollars and a year’s supply of beer. He was usually lonely and disoriented. Some mornings he’d wake up and plant a hundred tulips. Once, in his studio, the muralist said something like, “I don’t consider myself famous,” and I laughed, because I hadn’t called him famous either, and maybe also because I assumed that he’d be more interested in me if I didn’t take on the role of fan.
I didn’t want the power imbalance that might come from acknowledging that, for me, the muralist existed in both a personal and mythologized capacity: the artist I’d always known, whose career I’d followed, and at times, envied, as well as the guy I met the summer I turned twenty-four when we split a bottle of wine in a sculpture garden and stayed up talking about the ways in which our childhood pets died (my cat had pancreatitis; his parakeets went “the normal way”). I couldn’t be the same for him; I was stuck as a regular person in my dumb mortal body.
We first kissed beneath a large sculpture of a woman whose face was designed to distort and flatten as you circled it. We broke apart when a man walked by with two poodles who started shitting a few feet away from us.
On our second date, we drove out to the country to get fireworks for a photo series. He told me that there was a nearby aquarium he loved, which he soon revealed was actually just a fish store. I thought of a friend, who had once said that she imagined the purpose of her life was to live in a way that made a good story, who imagined herself in a book in lieu of a world with a god. It was easier to leave one observer behind if you submitted to another—it was much more lonely and existentially frightening to wake up every morning in a world where you felt unwatched. Years later, the internet would dub this “main character syndrome.” We squeezed through the aisles, reading handwritten labels beneath glowing shrimp. I thought: This is a person who knows how to enjoy the world.
Strangers would send the muralist unsolicited critiques of long-finished paintings, as well as deeply personal messages about their own lives. One woman asked if he’d paint her friend because the friend’s husband had cheated on her, and she thought he deserved to pass her face every day. Some people would send unprompted nudes of themselves, in hopes that he’d be so moved by their bodies he would have no choice but to memorialize them. A Belgian guy sent a DM about drunkenly peeing on his mural at night. The muralist thought this one was pretty funny.
His generic message responding to compliments used the term “very kind.” I thought the boilerplate reply was distant. Overall, he said he genuinely felt separate from his work. The walls didn’t even look like faces to him anymore in any meaningful way, just a mess of values.
I understood this, to an extent. I used to think I’d work in art too—I met the muralist not long after letting that go. Once, my high school French teacher asked the class to go around and write compliments for each person. When I unfolded my slips of paper, nearly all of them said that I was a good artist. I was crushed. I wanted to hear that I was funny or beautiful, or that being around me felt good. Drawing was a skill linked to practice and elongated visual memory. It was like being told: The best thing about you is how well you juggle, or, The best thing about you is that you run really fast.
I’d picked up art as a kid, because I was horribly shy and spent a lot of time alone. As I got older, I learned that if I doodled an eye in the margin of my homework, then someone would notice, would come over and talk to me, would ask me to draw them and sit still and spend time with me while I did. Even if I had no idea how to start a conversation, I could lure people over by offering a vision of themselves. Years later, I wondered if I’d ever really liked drawing, or if I’d only liked being good at something.
I couldn’t say if I truly liked making art or not, but around the muralist, I did feel a heightened love of beauty. In the grocery store, I picked up Meyer lemons to show him, and he knew when I presented him with them what I was saying: that they were the absolute perfect yellow; the yellow I felt closest to; one of my favorite things in the world. This was all real, but it was also something he drew out of me. While driving, he’d point to an orange field under the clouds, and I would know what he was saying as well. We laughed about people who treated artists like they were conduits to higher powers, but we’d also have sex and he’d scatter a jar full of petals over my naked body afterwards, and we’d say to each other, Isn’t this art, too? I couldn’t tell if we were being sincere. He carried me on his back through a yellow-lit cobblestone alley, an alley which we referred to as Paris. In the car, he’d look over while I was going on about a guy I knew who never wore blue jeans because he hates the color blue, as if there’s anything to dislike about blue besides its mildness. I saw him turn to me like I was the orange field disappearing into sky.
It wasn’t until a New Years party in a Richmond backyard that I understood the muralist wasn’t making it up, the way the city’s gaze followed him. Sometimes he complained about how this manifested in his day-to-day life. Artists, he claimed, would treat him differently: like someone who it was beneficial for them to know. I knew this change was stressful but, also, I obviously thought he was humble-bragging. At the party, we stood together as hundreds of tea candles reflected in metal buckets. I considered that I might be cooler than I had previously thought. I imagined that I was no longer a girl who once had to bribe people into friendship with colored pencil portraits, that I never had been. If he painted me right then, this would be the version of my life on the official record.
A guy in the circle began gushing to the muralist about how his work was transforming our city, how it gave this man pride to share a hometown with him. I knew he was making the muralist uncomfortable; I knew he wouldn’t know how to reply. I thought: I am too high to be here. I thought, Has nobody told this guy about being cool? I squeezed the muralist’s hand and tried to psychically transmit: I’m watching this happen, too.
This is why I couldn’t be a fan, couldn’t be the guy at the party waving around his praise for anyone to see, whose attention solidified both the muralist’s position as artist, as describer, and his own position as viewer, as receiver, as the one who wanted more. And still, there was a choice: remaining the main character in a life where I walked around and went to work and didn’t do much, or becoming a side character in a much more interesting story—in something people might actually read.
A girl at the party—a muralist with a smaller following—went to get a beer. On her way out, she ran her hand down the muralist’s back, like an early 2000s movie villain— even though I was right there, holding his hand inside my pocket. I hated her in that moment, with a pleasurable type of rage. She was looking at him, and he was looking at me. He’d made a career out of his gaze—one that people followed, their attention making him a rarefied observer who they looked to to tell them what was real, what belonged to the world of art and ideas. I wanted to live inside that world, and when he looked at me, I did.
When the muralist came to my apartment, I used to sneak him through my bedroom window, not because we had to, but because I lived on the first floor, and because we could, and because he was a person who understood whimsy and fun. When he left for Amsterdam, we tried to lucid dream so we could still be together. There is still beauty, I want to say, when no one is watching, but I could never stop watching him, watching myself, evaluating our dreams, praising them.
Maybe it was all worth it. When he broke up with me for vague reasons—something about an artist residency in Berlin that he hadn’t even been accepted to yet—I was wrecked. The following morning, I woke up too sad to get up to pee, even though I really needed to. I couldn’t rise and meet my new reality, a world where I couldn’t be the Meyer-lemon-yellow version of myself anymore.
Why we broke up and I went back to him, over and over is a lot like the story of how every emotionally unavailable couple ebbs and flows. He wanted to move to Amsterdam; I wanted to go to grad school. He panicked whenever the intimacy of our relationship reminded him of previous relationships and the hurt they caused. And I must have panicked at the thought of real closeness too because I kept choosing someone who couldn’t offer it.
That autumn, he painted an enormous portrait on a building that had once held an ice plant in a nearby town. At this point, we were quasi-back together. A week earlier, we’d swam naked in the river, but we’d been down this path enough to know it wouldn’t last. The ice plant project had started years before, and so he was painting a design he’d planned a long time ago. The woman looking mournfully over the field was his ex: a woman who was an artist herself, who had chosen to leave this man and this town, who, I assumed, would never write herself as a secondary character. The muralist referred to me as a writer, which was true: I wrote content for websites about drug trial recruitment and marketing copy about focus group incentives. I wanted to write something bigger, but I wasn’t sure what that meant or whether anyone truly wanted to read poems about finding dead birds at my grandmother’s house, and why I kept writing them if they didn’t. Sometimes I wondered if the muralist forgot that I painted too. His ex-girlfriend’s bangs were wet; tulips emerged from her hair. How ugly a desire, to want the exact gift he’d given her. How badly I wanted it anyway.
He had given me one mural-adjacent thing. First, it’s important to know how his mural process worked: he would begin by spraying a haphazard array of neon pink doodles on the wall, which he would then photograph and upload onto his computer. At this point, he’d select and overlay the doodles on his design, as a type of grid to help orient him. Once, back when we were dating, he flew to Germany to paint a man who had been killed in the Holocaust. The grid beneath the man’s face is full of squiggles and Xs and hearts, but there’s also a doodle of my first name hovering somewhere beneath his eyebrow. It was an outlandishly inappropriate romantic gesture, but I figured, at least I was actually Jewish. I’d take what I could get.
In the months that we were broken up, any time he painted a new mural in town, I’d pass his grid and look for myself in it, like a code. How could I not? The ice plant portrait of his ex-girlfriend was disparaged by locals who thought she looked too sad, but also chosen by a street art organization as their favorite mural of the year.
***
The muralist had one primary career goal and it was simply to paint as large as possible. It wasn’t because these walls would be seen by more people, he said, but that each escalation felt like a challenge, a game. He began at the start of adolescence, and has never stepped away. Every night before bed, he put his X-Acto-blade-wielding wrist in a splint.
He was generally ambivalent about the idea of fame, and tried to avoid appearing in his own social media. Recently, a friend and I were talking about whether or not we’d ever want to be famous. It seems obvious that being watched by a great number of people is bad for you, that fame reliably harms those who achieve it. A former reality star we follow on Instagram, we agreed, would probably be much happier if she weren’t constantly justifying her parenting choices to strangers and lived anonymously as an artsy mom. The influencer’s toddler recently started teething on an unused vibrator and everyone was upset. Wouldn’t it be better to just avoid that?
And still—how could I say I don’t want this regard when I’m doing what I’m doing? How can I act like I don’t think that being watched by a large number of people offers my life some legitimacy? When I’m still trying to put my mind and face in the public sphere, longing for murals and readers and proximity to fame? I’m still actively trying to be under that gaze, watched by people who haven’t met me. How do you separate the desire to make art from the desire to be seen? I have to believe there’s more to it all than this, but if I painted a billion foot wall, it would only be so that nobody could ever look away from me.
***
On Instagram, the reality star posts her morning banana to half a million followers. She preemptively adds a link to the headband she’s wearing, because she knows people will ask. I imagine how it feels to know that someone thinks that the way you arrange your refrigerator is, somehow, interesting. When the muralist popped a seltzer for me before I came over because he remembered I prefer them half-flat, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.
During one of our break ups, he said to me: This is how I’ll always think of you, how you look right now, with your face half in a pillow. I can never tell what you’re thinking about. This is obviously what I wanted my mural to look like. I wanted to not only be seen, but seen through the eyes of someone who was at least halfway in love with me—even if I felt most desired in the moment he told me he didn’t understand me. My idea of love depended, and to some extent, still depends upon this distance, this unbridgeable space in which to throw our longing, the inaccessibility that surrounds everyone who has ever captivated me, every lover, every star. I wanted to grow old and tell this story to my grandchildren and show them this mural, this monument to what my face looks like when I’m trying not to cry. I wanted to walk around in a gown saying, “You know, I was once very beautiful,” because it’s of crucial importance to all children that their grandparents are formerly hot. Anyway, I actually wasn’t thinking about anything at all. The only thing on my mind was a primal want for him to stay.
I never got my mural, although I tried. Over the years, I lost patience with my cool shtick, and just asked. He said he’d paint whatever I wanted if I found a wall for it. This past summer, I wrote a proposal in response to a call for muralists, explaining to a committee why I needed him to come paint my face really big on the side of a bar I go to often. We made the final rounds, but the design wasn’t accepted. Nothing has shown up in its place. Before the rejection, friends asked if I was sure I wanted my face so huge, right where everyone could see it. I couldn’t even imagine not wanting that, although I did feel embarrassed by how swollen my desire had grown. I haven’t stopped hoping for this mural, and if I heard of an open wall, I’d take it today. If you know one, tell me.
In the depths of my melodrama, I’d walk around Richmond under the gaze of his murals, and remind myself: This isn’t the whole world. One day, I told myself, I’m going to move somewhere new and nobody I’ll meet will have heard of him. I’ll climb a big hill and sit at the top with friends I haven’t met yet, and I won’t be able to imagine caring about what I care about now. I will half-heartedly disguise his identity, as if fame retains value when stripped from its context. He’ll still be a character, but smaller. I will be the one committing him to page, gazing at him, gazing at the shape I took around him: an outline, a portrait, a mural, a single shot with our faces mostly turned away. The story will continue without him. I’ll stay in a cabin in the darkest part of Iowa and watch a meteor shower in the damp grass until a cloud obscures what we drove out for. I’ll fall asleep in my contacts. I’ll bite into an apple and find that it’s smushed from the car and think of a tree he once planted that never bore fruit. I’ll think of him carrying me through the yellow alleyways. I’ll think of our arms outstretched from either side of a snowbank and it will light up very little in me or maybe nothing at all. These friends will have to take my word for it when I say there’s a place where all of this matters. This trust will be a kindness.
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Rumpus original art by Peter Witte
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